Advisers in Northeast prep for blizzard, close offices

Financial advisers in the Northeast heeded official warnings Monday of a “life threatening” blizzard on its way — many sending employees home early and making plans to work remotely over the next couple days if they can’t travel into the office.
While Home Depot sold out of shovels and grocery store shelves emptied along the 250-mile stretch from Northern New Jersey to Southern Maine that’s expecting the brunt of the storm, financial advisers in the region secured generators, powered up their extra phones and computers, and contacted clients who were also in the storm’s path.
“We anticipate being closed tomorrow and maybe Wednesday,” said Victoria Fillet, president of Blueprint Financial Planning in Hoboken, N.J. “We have some experience from Sandy, so we have all the systems prepared, and just about everything we can do at the office we can do from home.”
About 53 million people are in the path of the storm, with many areas declaring states of emergency, closing public transit systems and issuing travel bans for major roadways. The heaviest snows are expected Monday evening through the early hours of Tuesday. The National Weather Service is using terms like “life threatening” because of strong winds, blinding snow and flooding.
(More: Disaster teaches hard lessons)
Many advisers also likely were impacted by the more than 6,000 flights cancelled, as several large industry conferences are set to take place this week, including TD Ameritrade Institutional’s national adviser conference in San Diego and the Financial Services Institute’s OneVoice conference in San Antonio.
John Eckel, founder of Pinnacle Investment Management in Simsbury, Conn., is sending clients a note to let them all know the staff will not be in the office on Tuesday, and providing email and cell phone contact information.
“When we don’t have a shovel in our hands tomorrow digging out, we’ll be working from home,” Mr. Eckel said.
His firm learned a lot during Superstorm Sandy, which hit in October 2012 and left Pinnacle Investment Management and many other businesses and homes without power for an entire week. The firm tried to depend on small gasoline-powered generators, but they were not very effective and even damaging to computers because they fluctuate in power.
Today Mr. Eckel knows where he can quickly get good back-up power for the office, and has a generator for his home. The firm’s also moved its systems to the cloud, which makes remote access even more seamless, he said.
In fact, many firms learned lessons from Sandy, and the event led the Securities and Exchange Commission to ask advisers to get even more on top of their emergency planning.
This potentially historic storm may be the first test of whether advisers have heeded the calls of regulators.